Anglosphere feminism wants the best of all possible worlds: rights
without responsibilities; privileges without obligations. As we have
seen, Anglo-American feminism emerged among upper class English women
in the late Nineteenth Century. It embodies all the faults associated
with that type.
Virginia Woolf – Racist
Virginia Woolf is universally proclaimed as the radical proto-feminist icon among modern Anglo-American feminists:
Virginia Woolf, the most splendid modern writer, told us over and
over how awful it was to be a woman of creative intelligence. She told
us when she loaded a large stone into her pocket and walked into the
river; and she told us each time a book was published and when she went
mad – don’t hurt me for what I have done, I will hurt myself first, I
will be incapacitated and I will suffer and I will be punished and then
perhaps you need not destroy me, perhaps you will pity me, there is
such contempt in pity and I am so proud, won’t that be enough? (Dworkin
1983: 45)
This ridiculous passage presents Woolf as victim – when a cursory
glance at her background and attitudes shows her clearly to be a victimiser. Like most modern Anglo feminists, Wolff was racist, classist and elitist.
Astonishingly, Woolf is actually considered some sort of
revolutionary ‘radical’ by the Anglo feminist establishment. Let’s see
just how ‘radical’ she was, brimming over with philanthropic thoughts
for her fellow-men. On Sat 9th Jan 1915, Woolf gave full vent to her
eugenic and classist beliefs:
On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles.
The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice
at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then
one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable
ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin,
& an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly
horrible. They should certainly be killed (Woolf, 1979: 13).
On May 17th 1925 Woolf describes her instinctive reaction to non-white people:
...passing a nigger gentleman, perfectly fitted out in swallow
tail & bowler & gold headed cane; & what were his thoughts?
Of the degradation stamped on him, every time he raised his hand &
saw it black as a monkey's outside, tinged with flesh colour within (Woolf, 1981: 23).
There is also a sickening anti-Semitic outburst in a Feb 1940 diary entry, which for reasons of good taste is not included here.
These outrageous views should not surprise us. They (or attenuated
versions of them) are endemic in modern Anglo feminism. Those who
consider Anglo-American women to be morally superior (and a large
number do) should consider these statements carefully. As John Carey
and others have shown, the Modern movement in literature and the arts
was characterised by rabid racism and elitism (Carey: 1992).
Anglo-American feminism hails from the same patrician culture and
embodied similar values from its inception. For example, many early
feminists were racists and eugenicists (Nathanson and Young, 2001).
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was the daughter of Julia Jackson
Duckworth of the Duckworth publishing family, and Leslie Stephen, a
literary critic. She grew up at the family home at Hyde Park Gate. Her
mother died when she was a teenager. When her brother Toby died in
1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown.
In 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard Woolf (not a
farm hand or labourer, take note) and published her first book, The
Voyage Out in 1915. With To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931)
Woolf established herself as a leading modernist. She developed
innovative literary techniques in these works to find an alternative to
‘patriarchal’ views of reality. Of course, it never occurred to her,
that patrician, privately-tutored women’s experiences are equally
irrelevant to the vast majority of women. An excerpt from ‘Mrs
Dalloway’, one of Woolf’s most challenging works, underlines the
rarefied patrician tone:
What a surprise! In came Richard, holding out flowers. She had
failed him, once at Constantinople; and Lady Bruton, whose lunch
parties were said to be extraordinarly amusing, had not asked her (Woolf, 2000: 129).
A Room Of One's Own (1929) is Woolf’s piece de resistance, at least
for Anglo feminists. This is seen as a proto-feminist ‘statement’
describing how a woman’s creativity can blossom when she has financial
and personal independence. Here we can see the early, eccentric lines
of modern Anglo-American feminism: a narrow preoccupation with elite
experience, sexual repression and gendered isolation. Moreover, Wolff
was a fanatical upholder of her traditional ‘privileges’ as a patrician
female even while she clamoured for new ‘rights’.
Other highlights of her career include Three Guineas (1938), which
examined the necessity for women to strive for their own history and
literature. Orlando (1928), a rambling fantasy novel, traced the
polymorphous career of an androgynous protagonist from the Elizabethan
court to 1928. Woolf was also a prolific essayist, publishing some 500
essays in periodicals and collections.
After a final attack of insanity she loaded her pockets with stones and drowned herself near her Sussex home on March 28, 1941.
The prevailing theme of modern Anglo-American feminism – that women
are united by gender above all other considerations, especially class –
begins with Woolf and her acolytes. This essential problem still
hinders Anglo feminism: In one breath, they want responsibility and
autonomy. The next moment, they cling to their traditional prejudices
like limpets. Vast contradictions riddle their arguments.
The greatest absurdity in Anglo feminism is its arrant class
blindness. In lectures, books and articles, contemporary Anglo
feminists continually conflate international bridge-playing females
with char-women and five-dollar call-girls as if they all shared common
interests. As we have said elsewhere, Anglo-feminism is rather like
nationalism or racism, an attempt to inveigle disenfranchised women
into subordinating their claims as an oppressed class in favour of an
arbitrary gender link with their oppressors. It is faux revolt.
Contemporary feminists claim that disenfranchised males are just as
much ‘oppressors’ as men from Andover or Eton. Can the patrician
origins of Anglo feminism explain this absurd position?
Because early Anglo feminists were all upper class (indeed, most
still are) they knew nothing about mainstream social experience.
‘Ordinary’ women never entered their thoughts, except as objects of
domestic labour. ‘Ordinary’ men were mere beasts of burden.
Consequently, their ideas were absurdly skewed: while claiming to be
‘revolutionaries’ they unthinkingly retained their traditional
prejudices.
These characteristic contradictions can be seen in all subsequent
Anglo feminists: Greer (a ‘revolutionary’ who hates working class
women); Dworkin (a ‘revolutionary’ who favours censorship); Hite (a
‘revolutionary’ who ardently supports monogamy); Paglia (a
‘revolutionary’ who accepts men are biologically superior); Julie
Burchill (a racist, nationalist ‘revolutionary’). Of course, all
‘liberal’ Anglo feminists remain committed to such bourgeois
anachronisms as marriage to wealthy men and the protective platitudes
of organised religion. These absurd inconsistencies have a long
pedigree, dating back to the earliest origins of Anglo feminism,
exemplified by the classist, racist Woolf.
Whatever they say, Anglo feminists are natural allies of the
authoritarian right. The key lines of Anglo feminist thought were set
when Anglo-Saxon society was still pre-democratic and the broad masses
little better than serfs. Hence arrogant elitism pervades this brand of
feminism, something quite absent from the partnership feminism of
Continental Europe. Since Anglo men have begun to reject the Anglobitch
for women with traditional virtues, this intolerance has reached
feverish levels (‘Oh, those China/Hispanic/Russian Dolls!’).
Andrea Dworkin Deconstructed
Dworkin is one of the most prolific Anglo feminist writers. Her
work illustrates amply the follies of feminist thought. In Right Wing
Women, she writes:
It is white women who have become who have become poor and
extraneous with old age; they are taken from mainstream communities
where they are useless and dumped in nursing homes. It is important to
keep them away from those eager, young, middle-class white women who
might be demoralized at what is in store for them once they cease to be
useful (Dworkin: 1983:155).
This ridiculous conflation of the degrading treatment meted out to
the elderly in modern society with feminist issues is pernicious and
insulting. Dworkin seems to think that elderly males are being feted
with steak and champagne while elderly females eat bread and water.
Perhaps her distorted views reflect the fact that, their numbers
thinned by overwork, unequal divorce settlements, military service and
general vilification by the Anglo-American cultural establishment, too
few men survive into old age for a meaningful picture of post-work male
experience to be drawn.
It is in her discussion of the Sixties and the rise of the
Anglo-American feminist movement that the true flaws in her thinking
are revealed:
The sixties in the United States, repeated with different
tonalities throughout Western Europe, had a particularly democratic
character. One did not have to read Wilhelm Reich, though some did. It
was simple. A bunch of nasty bastards who hated making love were making
war. A bunch of boys who liked flowers were making love and refusing to
make war. These boys were wonderful and beautiful. They wanted peace.
They talked love, love, love, not romantic love but love of mankind
(translated by women: humankind). They grew their hair long and painted
their faces and wore colorful clothes and risked being treated like
girls. In resisting going to war, they were cowardly and sissies and
weak, like girls. No wonder the girls of the sixties thought that these
boys were their special friends, their special allies, lovers each and
every one (Dworkin, 1983: 89).
Firstly, let us put things in perspective, here. The Sixties’
counterculture did not embrace everyone, especially in Anglo Saxon
cultures. It was overwhelmingly an upper middle class phenomenon. Most
people – the poor, routine white-collar workers, the traditional middle
class – were entirely unaffected by countercultural values. Secondly,
American males in this counterculture were never at risk of going to
war. As members of the elite, and thus educated and privileged, they
all had college deferments. Finally, most women (‘girls of the
sixties’) were entirely contemptuous of men who rejected traditional
masculine gender roles. Women who embraced the counterculture were
overwhelmingly upper middle class and completely unrepresentative of
the female population as a whole.
Dworkin reveals this prejudice in the following passage:
They decried the stupidity of their mothers and allied
themselves on overt sexual terms with the long-haired boys who wanted
peace, freedom, and fucking everywhere. This was a world vision that
took girls out of the homes in which their mothers were dull captives
or automatons and at the same time turned the whole world, potentially,
into the best possible home (Dworkin, 1983: 90).
In assuming that all women were cocooned ‘in the home’ Dworkin
reveals her bourgeois and wildly unrepresentative origins. In truth,
the vast majority of women have always worked. In the Sixties and
before, those women who could afford not to work were middle class
women, period. Yet here she assumes that such women were the norm: they
may have been so in the women’s movement, but certainly not in society
at large.
But it is when she moves on to the reasons why women rejected the sexual revolution that unpleasant realities stand revealed:
In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology
and practice, neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an
issue. It was assumed that--unrepressed--everyone wanted intercourse
all the time (men, of course, had other important things to do; women
had no legitimate reason not to want to be fucked); and it was assumed
that in women an aversion to intercourse, or not climaxing from
intercourse, or not wanting intercourse at a particular time or with a
particular man, or wanting fewer partners than were available, or
getting tired, or being cross, were all signs of and proof of sexual
repression. (Dworkin, 1983: 92).
Tellingly, Dworkin does not elaborate on why ‘a particular man’
should be so offensive to a woman’s sexual sensibilities. A good guess
might be because he was working class, uneducated, black, or in some
other way offensive to the ingrained sexual elitism of the Anglobitch.
This was surely the real reason why Anglo women rejected the sexual
revolution: it was too revolutionary for them.
The sexual revolution, in order to work, required that abortion
be available to women on demand. If it were not, fucking would not be
available to men on demand. Getting laid was at stake. Not just getting
laid, but getting laid the way great numbers of boys and men had always
wanted--lots of girls who wanted it all the time outside marriage,
free, giving it away. The male-dominated Left agitated for
and fought for and argued for and even organized for and even provided
political and economic resources for abortion rights for women. The
left was militant on the issue (emphasis mine). (Dworkin, 1983: 95)
As well it might be. After all, equality relates as much to sexual
as to economic matters. Dworkin’s italicised phrase is eerily
significant: giving it away free. Fundamentally, this is what Dworkin
finds problematic about the sexual revolution: as an Anglobitch, giving
sex away free is almost a crime. For her, sex is something to be used
as a weapon to injure or manipulate men, not a sacrament of freedom.
The men refused to change but even more important they hated
the women for refusing to service them anymore on the old terms--there
it was, revealed for what it was. The women left the men--in droves.
The women formed an autonomous women's movement, a militant feminist
movement, to fight against the sexual cruelty they had experienced and
to fight for the sexual justice they had been denied (Dworkin, 1983: 96-7).
The women left in droves because authentic liberation left them
cold. Being Anglo females, and thus sexually elitist, they felt better
than black men or poor men, and consequently did not want to have sex
with them. And the women in the main did not form an autonomous women’s
movement – they moved on to marry business tycoons, movie moguls and
the like – in other words, they turned away from radicalism back to
traditional Anglobitch sexual parasitism because it suited them better
than ‘free love’. Jane Fonda is a stellar example of a ‘radical’ Anglo
feminist who saw fit to marry a string of millionaire media moguls
rather than street sweeps (Ted Turner, founder of CNN, being a prime
example).
They discovered the utter irrelevance of their own individual,
aesthetic, ethical, or political sensitivities (whether those
sensitivities were characterized by men as female or bourgeois or
puritanical) in sex as men practiced it. The sexual standard was the
male-to-female fuck, and women served it--it did not serve women (Dworkin, 1983: 91-92).
In truth, it did not serve Anglo women’s deep rooted sexual
elitism. That is the plain and simple truth of the matter. To her
credit, Dworkin does make some attempt to address this, even
identifying the keystone of Puritanism in Anglo-American female
attitudes:
Noxious male philosophers from all disciplines have, for
centuries, maintained that women follow a biological imperative derived
directly from their reproductive capacities that translates necessarily
into narrow lives, small minds, and a rather mean-spirited Puritanism (Dworkin, 1983: 13).
Interestingly, Dworkin is blind to the cultural specificity of
female ‘mean-spirited Puritanism.’ After all, French, Swedish or
Japanese men do not excoriate females for Puritanism, as men in the
Anglosphere do: they have no need to. French, Swedish or Japanese women
are not mean-spirited puritans: Anglo American women are. Not once is
the stilting influence of Anglo culture mentioned in any of Dworkin’s
writings, yet it is the sole cause of these differences. To make such
an admission would be to concede the establishmentarian nature of Anglo
feminism, however: and this is something Dworkin cannot endure.
Dworkin also famously advocated a universal ban on pornography. Her
position, predictably, was that pornography ‘causes’ rape (Dworkin,
1990). Unfortunately, no evidence has ever been presented to prove
this. Additionally, countries with high levels of pornographic
liberation have relatively low rates of sex crime and high rates of
female representation in politics:
The facts about pornography are depressingly few. Some experiments have
been carried out with students, but it is difficult to find any
incontrovertible connection between pornography and, say, violence
against women (Pickstone, 1996: 210).
Of course, the Anglo feminist hatred of pornography is merely a
modern expression of the Puritans’ hatred of art and beyond that, life
itself. Puritans detested the sensual grace of stained glass and
free-spirited, quasi-pagan carvings adorning Old English churches. The
glow of visual freedom disgusted their frigid sensibilities: so they
smashed it. In the same way, Anglo feminists loathe pornographic
depiction of the beautiful human form, however stylised or elegant:
hating the sensual world and life itself, they feel obliged to ban it.
Swedish feminism is about advancing women’s rights: Anglo feminism is
about restoring New England Puritanism. Modern Anglo feminist ‘art’
presents bloated female bodies menstruating or defecating, degrading
the female form to its basest level. The ideological conviction
underpinning this ‘art’ is a Puritanical loathing of physical life.
Dworkin also famously argued that sexual intercourse itself was a
patriarchal ‘crime’ against women (Dworkin, 1997). The penetrative,
possessive nature of the activity is, in her view, indistinguishable
from rape itself.
However, intercourse is not a social phenomenon, loaded with
political value: it is merely the means by which most land animals
reproduce their kind. Male spiders and mantids are often devoured by
the female during intercourse. How, then, can the sexual act itself be
automatically an act of male oppression? Again, the greater female
involvement in young-bearing merely reflects the biological fact that
the female’s body houses and nurtures the young, not that of the male.
It is not a social construction but the expression of physiological
necessity. The same gender-distinction is true for almost all land
animals. It is not a function of oppressive patriarchy but, like
intercourse, an organically predestined and unavoidable reality. Only
those with an insane rage against reality itself could label
intercourse and its products as patriarchal tyranny. Clearly, the views
of radical Anglo-American feminists are more than ridiculous: they are
frequently psychotic.
Despite their frequent lapses into dementia, some of Dworkin’s
ideas can actually enrich the Anglobitch thesis. In Right Wing Women
(1983) she claims conservative women hate homosexuals because
homosexuals inherently threaten their sole biological function with
superfluity. In exactly the same way, foreign women threaten the
Anglobitch and are detested and feared by the latter for this reason.
As an interesting postscript, if we turn to consider what the broad
masses of people were experiencing in the vaunted Sixties extolled by
‘radical’ feminists, the picture is invariably completely different to
the model presented as a norm by writers like Dworkin. The entire ‘if
you can remember the Sixties you weren’t there’ routine unthinkingly
extolled in books, films and documentaries founders completely when we
consider accounts of the period referring to mass experience, not just
that of urban sophisticates:
He also became a familiar figure at Gloucester’s ‘Private Shop’
– its one licensed outlet for sex aids and pornography and so on. The
Private Shop also used to be close to Cromwell Street. It used to be on
Barton Street for several years. But the pressure of public opinion
eventually moved it to the outskirts of the city. The move was resisted
by Darker Enterprises, the shop’s owners. But in 1987 they finally gave
in and moved to a premises on St Oswald’s Road, part of the South
Wales-Birmingham ring road, well away from the town centre. The Private
Shop now occupies a cabin in the cattle market (Burn, 2001: 158).
So, in a large English town we have one licensed sex shop to
indulge the Sixties ‘wave’ of liberation. ‘Public opinion’ forcefully
drives the Sex Shop to the outskirts of the city. Finally, the business
is effectively closed, shrinking to a seedy, marginalized venue where
coarse men trade and butcher cattle. It is difficult to see much
liberation in this sordid saga: rather, sexuality plainly retains its
illicit, pariah nature right through the 1960s into the modern era.
These events briskly debunk the myth of Swinging London: plainly,
British people in the provinces remained completely untouched by events
in the metropolis. And this distinction was maintained in the
Anglo-American world throughout the Sixties into the contemporary era.
A Few Good Men: Anglo Feminism and the Mythical ‘Man Shortage’
Let us consider the dust-jacket blurb on the back of Barbara Dafoe
Whitehead’s ‘Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the
New Single Woman’ (2003):
‘A double revolution is at work in modern American love. A
revolution in higher education has created the most independent
generation of young women in history, and a revolution in mating has
created a prolonged search for Mr Right. Through extensive research and
interviews, Whitehead documents the new social climate in which the
demands of work, the rise of cohabitation, the disappearance of
courtship, and the exacting standards of educated women are leading
them to stay single longer and to find the search for a mate even
harder when the time is right.’
This ‘man shortage’ has been a staple of Anglo-American
pop-feminism since the early Seventies. Whitehead admits early on there
is in fact no ‘man shortage’ at all: among American 30-34 year olds,
there are four never-married men (30%) for every three never-married
women (20%) (Whitehead, 2003: 10). Indeed if we accept Whitehead’s
figures, there is obviously a ‘woman shortage’, confounding her whole
thesis. Yet the rest of the book skirts this fact, focussing on such
red herrings as cohabitation and the decline of courtship.
The only obvious solution to this conundrum is that white,
middle-class women reflexively dismiss men of low socio-economic status
as potential mates, giving them the false impression there is a ‘man
shortage’. At a deeper level, it is obvious that middle-class,
post-feminist white women retain traditional expectations of ‘marrying
up’ in the midst of their new rights and freedoms. Traditional female
privileges have been squared with new rights to create impossible
expectations: and this is the broad error of Anglo-American feminism.
It is an unstable conceptual hybrid, completely unworkable in practice.
Sex is the pivotal female weapon for manipulating men, and it is
not in women’s interests to ever yield their power of sexual barter.
Women will always ration sex to the highest bidder, whatever rhetoric
of ‘liberation’ they care to espouse. Indeed, so ingrained is the
female expectation of marrying a male of high income and status that
men without resources are literally transparent to them. When ‘a
shortage of men’ is translated correctly as ‘a shortage of men with
more wealth than most women’ the true, vulpine values of post-feminist
Anglo-American women are revealed.
Of course, a genuine feminist revolution would have ensured that
women became indifferent to male income and other trappings of
‘patriarchy’. However, in the Anglosphere the retention of Puritanism
with its attendant ‘Pedestal Syndrome’ neutralised any such
possibility, allowing the Anglobitch to square her new rights with
archaic expectations and privileges.
Nina Farewell: Spokesperson for the Ugly Sex
Nina Farewell’s The Unfair Sex views all males as stooges, cads and fools:
No genuine full blooded male is trustworthy (Farewell, 2004: 11)
This onerous book, published in 1953, is invaluable in that it
probes Anglobitch attitudes and values, without the distorting filter
of Sixties liberal rhetoric. Here we see the true Anglobitch attitudes
towards sex, men and relationships:
Do not fall into a careless attitude of self-confidence in the
foolish belief that you have no Mating Instinct, or that if you have,
yours is under perfect control. As resolutely as you defend yourself
from Man, you must defend yourself from the enemy within (Farewell, 2004: 51)
Made giddy by the altitudes of abstract discussion, flustered
by his continual praises, she mechanically echoes his every word,
oblivious of where he is leading her. Suddenly she finds herself
agreeing as he scoffs at the conventions, the taboos, the restrictions
that strive to strangle the Man-Woman relationship…
…She is no petty bourgeoise, no, no. She is a pseudo-intellectual
noodle who will trade her birthright for a brief moment of cerebral
glory (Farewell, 2004: 68).
Note that female sexual favours (and all associated benefits) are
viewed as a ‘birthright,’ a license to status, wealth and privilege.
Female sexuality is entirely economized, commercialized and
disassociated with pleasure or humanity. In a psychological sense, it
seems bizarrely divorced from the persona of its ‘possessor’, rather
like an inanimate possession such as a Porsche, bungalow or potted
plant. We are reminded of the hysteria that beset Anglo women in the
absurdly puritanical Victorian era. Never was the link between female
sexuality and objective economic factors in the Anglo-American context
more self-apparent than in this polemic.
Farewell is especially keen to stress the dangers that seethe forever in foreign lands:
Even girls who speak several languages fluently are susceptible
and easily won by men of other lands. Perhaps these linguistic young
ladies think differently, when they converse in an alien tongue (Farewell, 2004: 102).
This is a telling insight into the problems of Anglo-American
culture. Since the limits of language are the limits of thought,
behaviour and its limits are inevitably shaped by linguistic factors.
The entire Anglo-Saxon cultural ensemble hinges on language above all
else (due to its dour Reformation origins).
Anglo females are supremely mono-dimensional. This
mono-dimensionality is the key to the Anglobitch personality. It can be
tersely described as a narrow urge to barter sex (or the promise of
sex) in return for material advantage. The entire mind, personality and
presentation are narrowly geared to this purpose: since language limits
a person’s conceptual horizons, it is only to be expected that
discoursing in another language will allow new concepts and behaviours
to infiltrate the subject’s mindset. Anglo females who learn foreign
languages are invariably softened and improved by the experience,
whether or not they engage in erotic discussions with foreign males. It
would seem that the English language embodies a particular value system
that reinforces the Anglobitch mentality.
It is known that Anglo females are encouraged in polite and passive forms of speech:
Other writers have probed more deeply than this rather random
selection of instances, and have argued that girls may be encouraged to
use a more deferential and hesitant form of language than men. Some
evidence suggests they may experience subtle pressure to use more
‘proper’ variants of language than men, as part of a general social
pressure to render themselves more socially correct because they are
women (Downing, 1980:109).
Most European languages have a defined distinction between intimate
and official forms (the sie/du distinction) and it is inviting to think
that confusion over this issue is what facilitates an unaccustomed
‘openness’ among Anglo-American females speaking a foreign tongue.
Discourse in English, with which they are intimately familiar, allows
them to retain the manipulative initiative viz a viz the studied
nuances of speech. They can effortlessly maintain the well-attested
‘wall’ against intimacy and sexual abandon that defines all their
interactions with men. Foreign speech throws them off balance into a
maelstrom of intimate, expressive humanity entirely alien to
Anglo-American females.
Indeed, this may be a universal phenomenon and could partly account
for the apparent pliability of foreign women to Anglo males. Although
this substantially derives from the cultural factors discussed in
Anglobitch, it is to be observed that males all over the world extol
the warmth of foreign women over their own (no doubt with good reason).
Even the Anglobitch has her aficionados, especially in the Latin world.
Also, the Anglo female, in speaking an alien tongue, automatically
discards the conceptual shackles associated with her usual role. Her
conception of social reality - its values, rehearsals and assumptions -
are embedded in the English language. When speaking an alien tongue she
has no recourse to traditional concepts of sexual manipulation typical
of Anglo culture. Notions like ‘taking’, ‘prick-teasing’ or
‘possessing’ are not embedded in foreign tongues, at least not in terms
readily formulated by the Anglobitch. Without psychological recourse to
these terms and the manipulative concepts that underpin them, she is
bereft of conceptual defences to her natural instinct toward physical
intimacy.
In particular, the Anglobitch association between sex and class is
confounded by discourse in foreign tongues. The equations normally
clicking away at the back of her mind (wherein she objectifies men as
disposable meal-tickets, as mere resources to be manipulated by the
promise of sex) are dispelled by the novelty of speaking in an alien
vernacular. Language is a conceptual ensemble embracing attitudes and
values as much as vocabulary and grammar. The Anglobitch is thus shorn
of the conceptual weapons she habitually uses to manipulate men when
deprived of her native tongue. This is ultimately why engaging in
conversation with foreigners throws her off-balance into the arms of
unaccustomed passion.
Consider also that foreigners seldom express themselves verbally
alone: their speech is augmented by gestures, postural changes and,
most of all, by touching. Touching in Anglo Saxon culture (especially
England) is comparative rare, with connotations of close intimacy
entirely alien to Latins (or indeed, anyone else). The stiff, formal
undertone of the culture inhibits any kind of sensual self-expression.
English people have the largest physical comfort zone in the world.
This well-observed difference between puritanical Anglo Saxons and
other peoples renders the Anglobitch susceptible to unfamiliar physical
overtures from foreign males, which disorientate her and expose her to
sexual infiltration.
Let us return to Farwell’s exegesis:
Flirting is the royal road to matrimony. It is the means by
which you can so possess a man that he will crave more and more of you
– and, in fact, all of you – which, of course, you are much too clever
to give, except in exchange for a wedding ring (Farewell, 2004: 163-4).
The official sanction of Marriage highlights the link between
Anglo-American cultural authority and Anglobitch privileges – which we
shall now consider in greater detail.
The Circle Closes
The US Government has recently taken steps to prevent American men
from marrying foreign women. In the US, at least 60% of marriages fail,
with the woman receiving the lion’s share of all financial proceeds. By
contrast, marriages between American men and foreign women are far more
successful, with a lower divorce rate (15% at most). The titular reason
for this ban is that several foreign women have been murdered in such
marriages (the vast confirmed total of three since 1995). Even the 1999
INS (U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service) report that
underpinned the legislation admits that less than 1% of abuse cases can
be clearly attributed to the international mail order bride industry
(USCIS 2007). Hence this excuse holds no water since, proportionally,
far more American women are murdered within abusive relationships. But
statistical realities count for little when Anglo-American feminism
needs to prevent the ‘Bountification’ of American men:
Such tragedies make for powerful headlines and fine political
oratory, and in January, with Washington State, Missouri, Texas, and
Hawaii all having already passed laws aimed at protecting foreign
brides, President Bush signed the International Marriage Broker
Regulation Act of 2005, or IMBRA. Under the new law, which a marriage
broker is challenging in court, IMBs (International Marriage Bureaus)
falling under U.S. jurisdiction would be required to provide
prospective brides with detailed information on any client requesting
their information, including a search of federal and state sex-offender
registries and a copy of the client’s stated marital and criminal
background (Garin, 2005).
IMBRA is part of the VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) and the
signature legislation of an official feminist organization rather
worryingly called ‘Legal Momentum’. Their whole opposition to foreign
dating agencies hinges on the argument that international brides are
subject to violence, exploitation and abuse by ‘violent’ and
‘dysfunctional’ American husbands. The only scientific study of foreign
marriages conducted by Dr Robert Scholes for the INS in 1999
discredited these assumptions: men who seek foreign brides are
typically highly educated, professionally successful, socially adept
and politically conservative (USCIS 2007). They desire a traditional
marriage, with a lower Divorce risk. All studies unwillingly concede
that such men do not fit the stereotype of a lonely, abusive alcoholic
routinely trotted out by Anglo feminists. And most mail-order brides
are evading poverty and exploitation: emigration to the United States
typically represents escape from feral males, prostitution and
violence.
Of course, the real feminist animus against foreign marriages lies
elsewhere. Simply put, those who frame such legislation know perfectly
well that Anglo-American women are no longer acceptable marriage
partners for solvent males. They also know that, given a choice, large
numbers of American men would marry traditionalist foreigners rather
than American women:
A few of the men paired off in animated, earnest conversations
about life, marriage, women. “I’m not going to spend every bit of my
life in America,” one was saying. “Because I am sick and tired of being
blamed for everything – the white man, you’re all responsible for
everything. And American women are just rude, obnoxious. I won’t marry
another American woman. I won’t do it. I’ll stay single first.” (Garin, 2005)
With no rational reason for the ban, we must conclude that the US
authorities are dimly becoming aware that American men prefer foreign
womanhood to the Anglobitch. But why should this be such a problem to
them?
Throughout this study we have generally accepted that the
Anglobitch phenomenon is somewhat ‘accidental’, having been shaped by
chance historical events. Here, however, we have clear proof of
Anglo-American political authorities actively seeking to maintain the
Anglobitch’s stranglehold. The authorities in Anglo-America are ‘on the
run’: their misguided policies have alienated men to such an extent
that they now resort to coercion, lies and other terror tactics to
‘ration’ men’s relationships away from traditional foreign women
towards Anglobitches alone. And Anglo feminists themselves are central
to this agenda: they recognize that expanding the erotic choices of
males across the Anglosphere will weaken their own monopoly on sex,
overthrowing the puritanical social contract and truly liberating men
for the first time. The whole Anglobitch sense of entitlement, contempt
and casual misandry – in short, ‘the pedestal syndrome’ – faces
imminent obliteration. Is it any wonder that Anglo feminists now stoop
to underhand tactics to fight the influx of foreign brides?
Another strand in the feminist assault on international dating
agencies is the unsubstantiated claim that they informally traffic
sex-workers into the country (Naraya, 1995). Even this specious
argument is motivated by self-interest. Anglo-American women derive
their privileges from sex being ‘rationed’: if sex lost its scarcity
value their accustomed pedestals would be removed. This explains the
feminist hysteria about ‘sex-trafficking’: their concern is not for the
women trafficked as sex workers, but losing their own privileged
status. All the rhetoric about international dating agencies exploiting
the power disparities between rich and poor or men and women is just a
smoke-screen to maintain this status. Anglo feminism in any case has a
long history of racism and elitism, which utterly discredits feminist
statements on these issues.
Mila Glodava and Richard Onizuka’s study, Mail Order Brides: Women
for Sale (1994) is often cited by the authorities as a ‘scholarly’
source of justification for IMBRA. This feminist polemic’s contribution
to the debate largely focuses on how foreign dating agencies create
‘unrealistic’ romantic aspirations for the participants. Well, if that
were the case (and it is by no means proven, only asserted) why not ban
the whole of the Anglo-American media? Michael Medved shows that the
American film industry has a consistent preoccupation with the
upper-middle class, libertines and ‘young people’ – a wildly
unrepresentative sample of the American population, at best (Medved,
1993). American TV shows seldom depict the average middle or working
class family: enormous emphasis is placed on the fabulously rich and
impossibly beautiful, alternative sexual lifestyles, wealthy career
criminals and, of course, ‘young people’. The elderly, the poor and the
conventional are conspicuous by their near total absence. All these
media products surely erect far more ‘unrealistic expectations’ than
the most imaginative foreign dating agency: why, then are they not
banned? Or do the Anglo-American authorities like to pick and choose
their ‘unrealistic’ objects of censure?
Speaking of arrant hypocrisy, the United States prides itself as
the world’s most consistent capitalist nation. If American men choose a
foreign bride over an Anglobitch, is this not merely capitalist freedom
of choice? Why should capitalism be allowed to operate in the field of
consumer goods, but not in bride-selection? If a consumer prefers a
Porsche over a Ford Mercury, that is his privilege as a free consumer.
Why should his elective autonomy be compromised when choosing a wife?
Aside from a reflexive desire to defend the existing order, is
there any practical reason for the U.S. authorities’ rabid opposition
to foreign dating agencies?
Divorce is part of a redistributionist economic policy enacted
against Anglo-American men. Men who undergo divorce essentially have to
sign over 70% of their assets to the female. In this manner, most
wealth in the US has passed into women’s hands. In a very real sense,
the Anglobitch and the institutions that support her are an underhand
taxation policy that takes wealth from the hardworking and astute and
gives it to the idle and spendthrift. In itself, this should have
little economic impact, in that wealth would ultimately be
redistributed by taxation anyway. However, Divorce prevents males from
ever achieving financial independence, guaranteeing their indebted
labour for life. Divorced males are the most prone to ill-health,
suicide and abbreviated longevity. This is little wonder, as they are
essentially highly productive, indentured slaves. This is the
difference made by Divorce to the Anglo-American economy, shackling men
to support needless over-consumption and over-production on the part of
parasitic ex-partners.
Hence the Anglobitch issue is economic as much as it is cultural or
political. Anglo-American Governments must necessarily inhibit the
sexual or marital options open to males in order to sustain themselves.
A sharp drop in the Divorce rate would have enormous repercussions on
the US economy and its rapacious ethos of ‘infinite growth’.
Citations
Dworkin, Andrea (1983): Right Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females. The Women’s Press Ltd., London.
Dworkin, Andrea (1997): Intercourse, Free Press, US.
Farewell, Nina (2004): The Unfair Sex, Icon Books, UK
Available from United States Customs and Integration Services:
http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=9ba5d0676988d010VgnVCM10000048f3d6a1RCRD&vgnextchannel=2c039c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD
[accessed
5th May 2007].
Glodava, Mila, and Richard Onizuka (1994) Mail-Order Brides: Women for Sale. Fort Collins, Colorado: Alaken, Inc.
Woolf, Virginia, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (1979): The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I: 1915-1919, Harcourt.
Woolf, Virginia, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (1981): The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1925-1930, Harvest/HBJ Book.
Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe (2003): Why There Are No Good Men Left:
The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman. Broadway Books, NY, USA
Pickstone, Ibid
Woolf, Virginia (2000): Mrs Dalloway, Penguin, UK.
Burn, Gordon (2001): Happy Like Murderers. Faber and Faber, UK.
Carey, John (1992): The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and
Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1800-1939. Faber and Faber.
Dworkin, Andrea (1990): Pornography: Men Possessing Women. E P Dutton; Reprint edition., US
Narayan, Uma (1995) Male-Order Brides: Immigrant Women, Domestic Violence, and Immigration Law. Hypatia, 10:1 (Winter): 104-120.
Garin, Kristoffer A Garin (2006): A Foreign Affair, Harper’s Magazine, June 2006.
